Outtakes from a Marriage by Ann Leary

Author:Ann Leary
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307449542
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2008-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

JULIA MANNING

MUSIC CRITIC

VILLAGE VOICE

But Joe—Joe was into me. He asked Alison about me all the time, and when the play was over, we would invite him to our parties and he would talk to me with his head tilted down a little, glancing up now and then to shoot me a look, and then away. Those puppy-dog eyes! That’s why we called him the Spaniel. His eyes and his loyal, tagalong determination to be with me even though I didn’t really encourage him. Finally one night, during that long July heat wave, I couldn’t get anyone to go out to a club where I thought I might run into Eddie, so I asked Joe. We had a few laughs and a few drinks at the club and then, just when we were heading out the door, Eddie arrived with the redhead. They said hello and walked into the club, and I was about to suggest to Joe that we go back inside when he put his arms around me and kissed me. He backed me up against the building, right there on the corner of Bowery and Fourth Street, right in the middle of that killer heat wave, and he kissed me like he would die if we stopped, and all those obsessive thoughts about Eddie sort of melted away.

We walked back to my place and I remember that the streets were soaked from the spray of unplugged fire extinguishers. A regatta of chicken bones, beer bottles, cigarette butts, and the occasional condom was floating along the gutter, causing us to leap on and off of the curbs. God, the city was filthy back then. It was late—probably around three in the morning—and the sidewalks were crowded with partially clad drunks and preppy college students and noisy transvestites and whores and addicts and teenaged clubgoers. Because the frontier had already been crossed, because we had already kissed and pawed each other for a good fifteen minutes outside the club, Joe kept pulling playfully on my jeans pockets and sliding his hot hands under my T-shirt and across my belly and up over my breasts and we tripped over each other as we made our way east. When we got back to the loft, we forgot all about the heat and didn’t worry about the broken fan in my room, we just threw the dirty clothes off my unmade bed and dove right in.

It was Joe’s urgency that got me. He couldn’t get his clothes off fast enough. At one point his jeans got stuck around one of his ankles and he staggered, groaning and cursing, until he had kicked off one bunched-up denim leg, and then the other. I pulled my T-shirt off over my head, but I left my bra and jeans on, and Joe looked at me for a second and then the bra and jeans were being pulled off. Although the sex didn’t last all that long, the next morning with Beth, and later at my internship,

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